Global Warming for Dummies

First, “Global Warming” is not a scientific term, but instead is a false propaganda campaign trying to promote a scare about CO2. And as the Satellites show no current warming, Antarctic ice is growing, global sea ice is normal and Greenland surface ice has grown since 1990 – since there have been no adverse trends in extreme weather**, floods or droughts, there is nothing at all to suggest anything to be scared about. Indeed, rising CO2 is greening the planet and leading to record harvests.

**Hurricane activity has reduced – this may be statistical fluke, the most intense level of rain has increased – this is likely because modern equipment is able to read shorter rain spikes.

What is “Global Warming”

Let’s first try to define a sensible meaning for “Global warming”. According to the Central England Temperature record below, (the best proxy we have for global temperatures before widespread measurements), England experiences regular changes in climate with up to 1.5C in 40 years shown in the record (1690-1730). Also there are several 1C swings, both up and down over around 30 years. So, it is not uncommon to see 2-3C/cent rates of changes over any 30year period and 4C/century occurs around “once in 350 year”.

Horizontal scale is in increments of 20years, Vertical in increments of 0.5C

From 1910-1940 and from 1970-200o the globe saw two periods of warming of 0.48C over 30 years. England experienced around 0.5C & 1C respectively (1.5 & 3C / century).

So, immediately we have a problem, because the scale of “global warming” is well within the normal variation (aka Climate Change) that FROM THE EVIDENCE the planet is constantly experiencing. Indeed, there is no indication at all from the CET record of anything different in the recent past that can be ascribed as a distinct “event” – indeed, because of the 1940-1970 “global cooling”, the warming seen over the entire 20th century was quite modest by historical standards.

Thus “Global Warming” used to refer to recent climate change, is a bit like referring to a rainy day in Scotland as “Scottish wetting” – yes it got wetter (today) – but it’s a meaningless concept as it gets wetter many many times a year. The same is true of climate, it’s constantly “global warming” and “global cooling” it’s just that it climate changes are slower and we happen to have lived through a period of warming (up till ~2000)

Therefore “Global warming” is a meaningless phase – and it’s certainly unscientific. Instead people seem to use “global warming” to be mean something like “Catastrophic warming” – that is to say, warming that is much greater than normally experienced. However, again, that has the problem that we saw much greater warming from 1690 to 1730.

So, there has been nothing at all to suggest “Catastrophic warming” in the past temperature record. But what of the Future?

Future predictions

The past shows nothing abnormal about the present period. But can a case be made to suggest the future will be abnormal?

According to the IPCC (using a very out of date version of the HITRAN database of gas absorption spectra**) a doubling of the CO2 concentration leads to around 1C** warming and that doubling is expected over the next 100 years. This 1C/century is such a small change that given normal climate change of up to 4C/century it will be impossible to detect.

However, like everything in climate – the argument gets worse when examined, because the IPCC use the out of date HITRAN data. When Herman Harde (an expert in gas absorption) repeated the calculations with updated figures from HITRAN he came up with a figure nearer 0.6C/cent.

So, the later version of HITRAN appears to tell us that “human caused” change will be up to an order of magnitude less than natural change. As such it will certainly be impossible to tell any human caused changes in the mass of normal variation!

So why all the fuss?

The reason for this fuss, is one simple fact: climate researchers like Hansen, Mann and others at the IPCC DENY the obvious and simple fact that natural variation and natural climate change exists. Instead they hold the (false) view that there are only a very few things that affect climate. This what is termed a “hockeystick” in climate. It is a false assertion that the past had no change (the handle of the hockeystick) and that suddenly (when we started measuring it), the climate started to vary (logically because we started measuring it – but they are eco-politcally motivated to find some human activity to blame)

So, those like Hansen, (falsely) assert only some things can affect the climate. Most of these can be shown to have had little effect – as their measured change does not relate to any changes in climate. Except unfortunately CO2 started to be accurately measured as its level increased at the same time we saw warming after the the “global cooling scare”. And as we all know – just because two things occur at the same time doesn’t mean they are related:

But because CO2 increased and it was known to have some warming effect, the two could be linked. But take a look at those figures:

Warming 1970-2000: 0.48C

Estimated effect from CO2 (1C/doubling) = 0.16C**

Thus we have a difference of: 0.48 – 0.16 = 0.32C which means that overwhelmingly the warming was caused by natural variation.

The false argument: “Nothing else could have caused it”

So, how do those like the IPCC come up with statements to the effect “we know (>95% sure) most warming is due to mankind”. The warming we saw was far from unusual, the calculation of the effect is much smaller than natural variation, so how do the people pushing “global warming” come up with this idea of the “world’s greatest problem to men, mice and ducks?”

Well, it all comes down to there false assertion that Climate Change did not occur before we started global measurements. They deny natural variation exists, that allows them to say “what else but CO2 could have caused it”, which in turns allows them to falsely fabricate a relationship as follows:

Where T is temperature rise, C is the contribution from knowns (aka CO2), and k is a constant (describing feedbacks). And because the globe saw 0.48C rise from 1970 to 2000 from a CO2 contribution of 0.16C**, they calculate:

k = 0.48 / 0.16 = 3

From which they can then assert, that for a doubling of CO2 expected to cause 1C** warming, the total warming will be:

T = 3 x 1C * = ~3C

Note even this scaled up warming is less than was seen in CET from 1690-1730.

How can this be called “Science”?

The simple answer is that it isn’t science in any shape or form. Instead it is “science” only because they (falsely) claim to be scientists, and they hide the process by which this scaling factor is derived in complex models. And because it is never spelt out in any IPCC report how they falsely derived this unscientific scaling fact, most people don’t have any clue that the scare is hocus pocus nonsense based on the the false assertion that Natural Variation does not exist.

How then can they justify this voodoo BS even to themselves? The answer, is that they BELIEVE (for it is a religious belief) that natural variation does not exist, and they imagine there are “positive feedbacks” in the climate. And they assure themselves that this hocus pocus calculation above (based on no natural climate change) is the way to calculate these “feedbacks”. This then allows them to justify their non-science.

Unfortunately, feedbacks do exist: melting ice might expose darker rock – that this darker rock absorbs more sunlight and leads to more heating – great except it is very small in effect and in no way can justify the 3x scaling of CO2 effects.

Another is to proclaim that increased temperature means more clouds and that clouds trap heat – except, anyone who goes out on a hot day, knows that clouds also build up on hot days and that they block the sun and reduce heat. But because there are positive feedbacks even though they have no way to show the positive feedbacks dominate and negative don’t except to point to the bogus scaling above, they cannot in any way claim this claptrap as “science” – but they do.

But they get away with it by saying”clouds are poorly understood”, when in truth what they mean is that “clouds don’t fit their bogus eco-non-science”.

The Pause

The problem for those who like to scale up CO2 warming on the false assertion “what else could have caused it”, is that unless the climate kept warming in line with CO2, then it was provably false that “CO2 done it”.And above we see the only really global temperature (from satellites) together with balloon datasets – neither of which suffer from the “urban heating” effect of surface stations (which tended to be just on the outskirts of large towns and cities which have changed most with urbanisation over the last century).

So, the pause proved the scaling aka “massive positive feedbacks” was a total crock. And it was because the pause disproved “global warming”, that both NOAA and NASA subject to Democratic pressure to “prove” the Republicans wrong, resorted to outright fabrication of their data (link, link, link)

The truth: negative feedbacks Dominate

Below is a reconstruction of the climate for the last 2.5million years. As we can see, the temperature of the peak of the ice-ages has been slowly declining, but the peak “interglacial” temperature remains fairly stable.

To anyone who understands feedback systems this screams one simple fact: negative feedbacks dominate so as to tend to reduce warming and limit further warming in interglacials. And it is because negative feedbacks dominate and stop warming, that each interglacial has much the same temperature (unlike the peak of the glacials which are changing).

Thus, if we go back to the equation:

T = kC

The climate researchers have a value of k around +3, this means there must be extremely high levels of positive feedback giving the equation:

T = 3 C

In contrast, the above graph proves that negative feedbacks are present limiting warming in interglacial. Typically these might reduce warming by about 50% of expected. So, if we then reapply this to the equation we find a more realistic equation is:

T = 0.5 C

So if we use the IPCC figure of 1C/doubling, this suggests CO2 induced warming of around 0.5C. If however, we use the Harde figure of 0.6C, the warming is around 0.3C. Given that negative feedback could be larger or smaller, this suggests warming in the range of:

0.15C – 0.45C for a doubling of CO2.

And this, unlike the IPCC fabricated relationship, is a scientific figure – at least as scientific as our current level of knowledge permits. And if we go back to the Central England Temperature record:

Horizontal scale is in increments of 20years, Vertical in increments of 0.5C

We see that even at its maximum, the scale of suggested warming of 0.5C (one grid line), is happening all the time throughout the record. In other words, as this scale of change is happening all the time, there is no chance whatsoever of detecting “CO2 warning” as its effect will be so small against the much larger scale of normal and natural climate change.

**Note these use the higher IPCC result based on older HITRAN database – the real figure is probably 40% lower.